the present study was an attempt to conduct a contrastive analysis between general english (ge) and english for specific purposes (esp) texts in terms of cohesion and cohesive devices. to this end, thirty texts from different esp and ge textbooks were randomly selected. then they were analyzed manually to find the frequency of cohesive devices. cohesive devices include reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and, lexical cohesion. the analysis was carried out on the basis of what halliday and hassan (1976) presented in their book cohesion in english. since all the research questions dealt with the differences among a number of variables, several pearson chi-squares were conducted through spss version 16. the results indicated that there are significant differences between ge and esp texts in terms of reference, substitution, ellipsis and lexical cohesion but there is no significant difference between the two text types in terms of conjunction.